Discussion
This paper examines how forced emigration following Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine catalysed a distinctive turn toward multilingualism in Russian-language drama, where linguistic heterogeneity functions not only as a representation of new contexts but as a revealing of suppressed identities and colonial oppression.
Focusing on three plays by Russian-language exilic playwrights, I examine how they incorporate languages and cultures of their host countries and exile communities — as well as minority languages that "should" have been their mother tongues but were lost through Soviet/Russian linguistic imperialism. Their multilingualism marks multiple forms of linguistic displacement: the pragmatic acquisition of host-country languages for bureaucratic survival; lateral solidarities with other displaced communities; and the uncanny resurfacing of ancestral languages that were oppressed and replaced by Russian during the Soviet period but return through emigration as affective, if not grammatical, inheritances.
Elina Mnatsyan's Martingale (2024) constructs a documentary play from multilingual interactions collected in a German refugee camp, incorporating eight different languages. The protagonist—ethnically Armenian but raised Russian-speaking—had begun learning Georgian during an earlier emigration, then finds herself in Germany learning yet another language while communicating with fellow refugees through translation apps. The play stages a Babel-like collapse of the previous world's seemingly stable linguistic and territorial borders, while proposing multilingual coexistence as an almost-utopian response to the war's coloniality.
Ilshat Saetov's Patronymic name, 2025, transmits in Russian the realities of Russian, Tatar (the autofictional protagonist originates from Tatarstan), and French (where he relocated his family in 2022) cultures. The play constructs temporal loops in which the protagonist's memories and diary entries about his mother who learned Russian (the state's official language) only upon entering university in Kazan, where Tatar was absent and considered as rural, coexist with his own narratives of learning Russian in school, his current struggles with French bureaucratic machinery, and his teenage son's resistance to yet another imposed language.
Yulia Tupikina's Wild (2025) follows a protagonist in French emigration who spontaneously begins remembering phrases in Georgian, a language she does not know but could have known, given her Georgian ancestry. Meanwhile, her husband begins reflecting on indigenous Siberian peoples from the family that threatens intergenerational continuity. The play thus stages three simultaneous trajectories of linguistic displacement within a single emigrant household.
